Othello

The best thing about Bell Shakespeare’s Othello is Ray Chong Nee.

He brings strength and charisma to the warrior Moor but also an unusual humanizing lyricism of manner (perhaps from his Islander background), which helps makes true Othello’s impossibly fast slide into jealous obsession.   

Chong Nee in fact unravels too much, by the end dwindling into an epileptic animal shuffling off to strangle Desdemona.

Urging him on is Iago, played here by Yalin Ozucelik more as joker than villain, his splutter of showy gestures slicing up the language and leaving us with little insight into what drives Iago’s villainy.   Surely it’s more than just being passed over for promotion, by his rival, the handsome, lucky boy Cassio (a suitably patrician Michael Wahr)?

Indeed, language and meaning falls victim in this Peter Evans production although some performances still shine. Elizabeth Nabben is a highly spirited Desdemona, defying the role’s usual fey femininity; and Joanna Downing is convincing as Emilia.  The show is at its best when these two reply to the play’s shocking misogyny and violence. 

What flattens this production is Michael Hankin’s under-lit, place-less set of ugly columns and everything covered in green velvet – a heavy-handed allusion to Othello’s green-eyed jealousy.

A central table on rollers is pushed constantly into different uses, some of them inventive in quick scenes, but the play’s physicality and group choreography is often pedestrian – and the fake fights add to the disconnect.  So it’s a shame when the language too is thrown over in the rush.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud